Essential Guide to Internet Marketing

Because traditional marketing techniques are getting expensive an ineffective nowadays, you need to turn to something that is more efficient and affordable at the same time. Well, internet marketing is the answer. Whether you are a marketer or a business owner that needs to promote your business, you should use internet marketing as one of your strongest marketing strategies because it’s currently a hit and inexpensive.

So if you are serious in making your business successful, you should promote you business through internet marketing. Read on to find out how you can use internet marketing to extend your company’s promotional reach and make your business succeed without breaking the bank.

Create a Keyword Strategy

The first thing you need to do to make your internet marketing strategy work is to create a keyword strategy. Optimizing your website, blog and social networking accounts through proper and competitive keywords will make your business easier to be found on search engines.

It is hard, though, to determine what or which keyword you should use. You can solve this by using various tools that you can find on the Internet to determine the best keywords that you should use in your keyword strategy.

Follow these steps to create your own keyword strategy:

1. Create a list of 3-5 Keywords that You will Use

These keywords should be relevant to your business or industry. Avoid using your brand name if you have a small or medium business because most people might not use your brand name in searching for the things they need.

2. Choose Keywords Based on Relevance and Difficulty

Do not use keywords that are too generic because they are hard to compete at. Use targeted keywords that are quite relevant with your business. Including a geolocation on your keywords will help.

You can use various tools to determine the competency of your chosen keyword. Google Keyword Tool is one of the best tools that you can use to determine which keywords you should use depending on its relevance and difficulty. This tool will also suggest keywords that you can use on your keyword strategy.

3. Design Your Website Around Your Keyword

Edit your website so that you can incorporate your keywords on your website. Make your website compatible with your chosen keywords so that your website will look natural and optimized. If not, your website will look stiff and unappealing both to your target audience and to search engine robots.

Optimize Your Website to Get Found

Once you have established your keyword strategy, you should now focus on your website optimization. Keyword optimization will not be quite effective if your website is not optimized as well. Make sure you optimize your website so that search engine robots will easily find it.

To be able to determine how much optimization you need to do to your website, you have to check your SEO with a grading tool that will determine your website’s standing. MarketingGrade Tool will help do that so be sure to check your website first.

Here are some steps that you can do to optimize your website (SEO):

On-Page Optimization

Page Title

The first thing that you need to optimize on your website is your page title. This is significant because search engines read them and determine if your overall content is relevant to your page title. Optimize your page title by:

Including keywords in your title.

Placing your keywords at the first part of your page title.

Making it short: 70 characters or shorter if possible.

Using different page titles for different pages so you can target different keywords in different pages.

Putting your company name at the end of your page title.

Meta Description and Meta Data

Make you description relevant to your website. Use less than 150 characters so that searchers can read your full description. This is for users’ use and not for SEO purposes though it’s also important.

Headings

Use appropriate headings. Make the most important phrase or part of your content the main header or h1. Less significant details can be tagged with h2, h3, h4 and so on. This will determine the hierarchy of your content. The more appropriate your headings are, the more the crawlers will see your website as more valuable and useful.

CSS

Make sure you use CSS so that you won’t override the necessary HTML text in your website that crawlers should find.

Images

Be sure to use optimized description tags on your images to help crawlers see your keywords on your image alt tags.

Domain Info

The older your domain is the better. Search engine robots see old domains as ‘strong’ domains and not just a spam domain. Extend your website registration so you can give your website ranka boost.

Google Crawl Date

To make Google’s crawlers check your website more frequently, you should produce fresh and unique content regularly.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Putting too much keyword in your content or overall website will make your website look spammy. Instead of being indexed, crawlers will avoid your website, making your rankings drop.

Use your keywords whenever needed and don’t put them where they don’t belong. Surrounding them with relevant terms and phrases will greatly help in your optimization.

Off-Page optimization

Inbound Links

To make your website increase its authority, you should gather inbound links from other powerful websites. You can do this by creating valuable content that other websites can use. Once other websites cite your website on their content, you are increasing your inbound links and ultimately your website authority.

Create a Blog and Marketing Offers

One of the best ways to promote your business is through blogging. By blogging, you will be able to showcase your company’s features. You will also be able to reach out to your audiences by providing helpful posts that are compelling and intriguing at the same time. Make your blog a place where you can interact with your target audience while providing useful tips, tools and freebies.

You can also use your blog to regularly update your website. Because you can’t regularly update your main website, you need a blog so that you can frequently post updates to make your website active. Just remember to create great content that is quite relevant to your business to make your blog more efficient:

Compelling

Well-structured

Has appropriate links

Has a clear call-to-action

You should use your blog to generate leads so that you can have a group of subscribers that you can send your offers to.

Promote Content through Social Media

After you have created your keyword strategy and blog, you should now promote it on various social networking sites so you can reach more audiences. It’s best to use the most popular social networking sites for your promotion so that you can reach a lot of target audiences. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some of the most popular social networking sites today.

Convert Website Traffic into Leads

Visitors are nothing if you can’t turn them into customers. Create a call-to-action so that you can turn your website visitors into loyal customers. Below are steps on how you can turn your visitors into patrons:

Choose Your Offer

Make sure your offer is compelling and will make your visitors more interested in your business. You can offer webinars, free products and downloads to your target audiences to get them engaged.

Create Calls-to-Action

To make your audiences do what you want – sign up to your webinars, buy your products or engage on your offers – you should create a clear and compelling call-to-action. You should put your CTAs on places where your readers can easily see them. Also, make your CTAs easy to understand or navigate so that your readers won’t get frustrated.

Create Landing Pages

You can also put your CTAs on landing pages so that more people can see them. Make sure that your landing page is easy to navigate and doesn’t have too many instructions and offers to avoid confusion.

It’s best to test and monitor your CTAs so that you can determine which ones work and which ones do not.

Nurture Leads with Targeted Messages

After you have gathered your audiences and turned them into subscribers, you should create a list of follow up messages that are targeted. These messages will contain your other offers that you want to present to your audience. You can also send freebies using your targeted messages to get your subscribers stay engaged in your list and offers.

Timing is key in nurturing your leads. Make sure you send offers when your subscribers need them so that they will see your offers as solutions to their problems. You can do this by monitoring their interactions on social networking sites and other websites relevant to your business.

Optimize Your Marketing for Mobile Viewing

Make sure your website, blog and landing pages can easily be browsed through mobile devices so that you can extend your reach. Many people are now using their mobile phones to access the Internet so it’s best to take advantage of it. Make your website mobile-friendly. You can also make apps so your target audience can view your website much easier wherever they are.

Analyze and Refine Strategies

After you have created and done all the internet marketing strategies that you have formulated, you should now allot time to analyze and refine them. This way, you’ll be able to improve the strategies that need updating, get rid of the stuff that are not working and include additional strategies that you think would improve your marketing.

Be sure to do this regularly to avoid problems that could hurt your business.